Shoreless
by coincident
Summary: The history of the world is but the biography of great men. MadaIta/one-shot.


**A/N:** Warnings for this include absolutely raging purple prose and mild paedophilia. Thanks for being 200 years old, Madara.

**Disclaimerrific:** Total stealage. The summary is a line from the old-school historian Thomas Carlyle. The quote at the end is from Ayn Rand's Fountainhead. Aaaand...Madara's so-called 'funeral song' is from a poem, "Closed Path" by Rabindranath Tagore.

Enjoy.

* * *

The Uchiha had refused to give Obito a proper funeral—a sharingan eye, what a thing to give away—and as a result, there was the Nakano River and candles and chrysanthemum petals and villagers, stretching away around the compound and giving silent vigil to the dead boy in his insensate ashes. The surface of the water was fractured by the light and the flowers. Up to his knees in the malleable topsoil of the bank, a white-haired boy gave a cry and pitched forward into the river, shaking with hoarse sobs; murky water came and lapped at his skin like the great decaying force it was, but the dark-eyed Uchihas at the far side of the bank remained entirely dry. The makeshift funeral had been an insult subtle enough to compel their attendance.

Later, Madara would find it appropriate that it was there, at that strange half-sincere delta of chessboard loyalties, that he laid eyes on the young Uchiha Itachi for the first time.

He couldn't really have been called Uchiha Itachi at that point; he wore his name like his formal yukata, patiently long-suffering but inherently uncomfortable nonetheless. The next clan head—the fourth since Madara himself—was five years old, and the signs of the legend he would grow into were already so firmly in place that Madara couldn't resist an inward scoff at his predictability. Itachi stood not with his parents, but a boy enough like Izuna to send the ghosts flickering over Madara's skin—Shisui, according to his perusal of the clan's family records—and his hold on the older boy's hand was controlled, unemotional; Madara knew it probably made no sense to him, the fact that Uchiha Obito, now gone, was honored above those who had actually survived through the war. Surely, to a shinobi of five, staying alive was the greater accomplishment.

Then Shisui said something and Itachi turned his head up to his cousin and offered a little smile like the edge of an orange, curved, bright, sharply pungent, and Madara felt a sudden derailment—_abandon this, now, he's only a child_—that was completely out of place for a shinobi of his stature. Then he noticed other things—for one, the fact that Itachi's hands were covered with scratches; for another, that his hair was uncut and unbound, as if no one had paid attention to it for a very long time; for the last, that his body was still, an unnerving stillness, inexplicably wrong on a five-year-old's stocky little frame.

_Wartime_, he thought. You never noticed when war could turn you into something unfamiliar. It would wrap you in paper and bandages until the eyes in the mirror were nothing more than the unfinished points of a mask. You realized the metamorphosis after you'd grown your red wings and your chrysalis returned to its dust, until you were something you had never set out to be, and that was the fact of the matter—a change without a change, a seamless disintegration of the older, better version, something as smooth as the turn of the tides, just without a vigilant moon to draw you back home.

He had been sixteen during his war. Itachi was five. Already, at that first meeting, Itachi was older to him than he was in real life.

In his realization he let his disguise jutsu go for a moment, and for the nanosecond flicker of corporeality that came with the lapse, Itachi's eyes went up, his small mouth went slack, but even as he tugged on Shisui's hand Madara phased back into invisibility. Still, the little boy remained watchful, and Madara felt, for the first and last time, a centuries-displaced thrum of paternal pride.

The river bore Uchiha Obito away, but the Madara that stood at the bank had been long in the making, and he knew better than to linger with his fingers in a dead man's hair. He left the riverbank and sunk back into the forests, and the candles in the water made stained-glass patterns on Itachi's face.

Blood and bone, sight and spirit—the boy was already his in every way that mattered.

**~X~**

The next time, Itachi was six, and the same legs that sent him in his whirlwind dash across the village brought him crashing into Madara as surely as a compass points north—and really, this would have been quite the symbolic development in their non-relationship if Itachi hadn't immediately stood and bowed and prepared to dart off away again, movements quicksilver fast, evidently eager to be gone. Madara had been following his descendants with almost perverse meticulousness for years, and he knew there was only one event that could spur Itachi into such a flurry of activity during this particular nine-month stretch of time.

"I wish you great happiness of your little brother," he said as Itachi was about to sprint, and the polite little boy's head snapped up, giving Madara a glimpse of the same disorienting eyes he remembered from Obito's funeral and reassuring him, with unconquerable certainty, that those eyes and their bearer hadn't changed at all.

_He is still not ready_.

"How do you know…"

"Your mother has just gone into labor, hasn't she?"

Itachi nodded. He was still small, and his eyes were so wide, but even in the middle of his excitement, he had a sedateness about him, like the thin core of blue at the center of flame.

"There are very few Uchiha women," said Madara. "The line runs to men. You wanted a little brother?"

Itachi nodded again, letting a section of hair splash across his cheek. And Madara gave himself up to the gesture of lovers, of parents—even then, he found it ironic that it was the same for both, an eerie foreshadowing of the tangled relationships a beautiful child could grow into—and touched the lock of hair, curled it in his fingertips for a moment, returned it to its place behind Itachi's ear. The same small mouth opened, the same dark eyes widened, and Madara could see the flash of recognition behind Itachi's closed face.

"You are the man at Obito onii-san's funeral—"

"Yes, Itachi-kun."

"How do you know my name?"

"Many people know your name."

This answer was clearly not satisfactory to Itachi, for he opened his mouth to protest, but Madara said, "You should be going. Your little brother must be on his way by now," and Itachi turned on his feet, a man at a funeral paling beside the thought of a new baby brother, and he bobbed in a half-bow again before stretching his pistonlike legs and tearing a path back down the dusty road that led to the Uchiha complex.

It was easy to envision Uchiha Itachi winking out like an insignificant star—that, or going nova in the soundless thunder of eradication, ripping a rent in the universe and knocking the rest of the celestial neighborhood out of its orbit entirely. Such an elegant force of destruction, but a force of destruction nonetheless, its blast radius as of yet undecided.

The moment Uchiha Madara realized anything was undecided, it stopped being so. That, too, was a fact, and then his little something-descendant turned on the road and affixed him with that shattering stare, and Madara felt his mouth relentlessly form the shape of a smile.

"Go on," he called, the sunlight and the words closing the space between them. "We'll meet again, Itachi-kun."

The last clean nod he would see for two more years, and then the feet kicked up dust and the little shinobi left to meet his new brother.

A life long enough eventually became its own river delta, host to the same water in its flow year after year after year. Itachi should have been nothing more than another cold current in the flood, but it was easy to forget that. Already the lines in Madara's mind had begun to blur, parentchildfriendpupil, all at once and none at all. He knew, though, that a life longer still would eradicate the symmetry even more, erase the similiarities as the earth fell away beneath him. He wondered how many more years it would take for him to attain the birdseye sight of the immortal—now the last great hurdle to everlasting vision.

So many lines delineating so many boundaries. Itachi was still his, but in a different way, or none of them, or all of them at the same time.

Whatever the case, it was still too soon to tell.

**~X~**

"I know you are there, even if you are invisible," and that was the third time, the last time the numbers had any meaning. Madara raised his eyebrows in interest to find Itachi staring at him with all the fixed intensity of a newly formed sharingan.

"Congratulations," he said, and extended his hand. Itachi took it with a calm steadiness that would later become his famous elegance, but right now was simply caution, unromantic, the same attitude displayed by slum children and shinobi alike.

"Are you going to tell me who you are now?"

"You haven't asked?"

"I am new at the academy. No one will believe me."

Madara relished this, the tone just to the side of bitter. "You don't wonder why no one else sees me?"

"No one else wants to see you," said Itachi as if it were obvious, and in a way it was—Konoha adults grew soft in their own ways, willing to discount the evidence of their eyes as superstition, old ghosts, hallucinations, fragments of misdirected psychology. Madara liked that a child of eight could see past this willful ignorance, although he shouldn't have been surprised—after all, spliced and divided by genetics and marriage, it was his own heart flaring at him from inside that blank slate of a chest.

"Tell me who you are," said Itachi, still polite even with the demand in his words.

"My name is Uchiha Madara," said Madara, and then he bowed. Politeness was such a part of eight-year-old Itachi that he knew it would make an indelible impression as nothing else would. Itachi bowed back, and then as he mentally traced his genealogy for the correct mode of address, his mouth fell a few centimeters open in the expression of surprise Madara was already coming to learn so well.

"That's your first mistake, Itachi-kun. You shouldn't be so quick to believe me without proof."

Itachi's cheeks flushed; he was still at the fairytale age when there was a thin line between proof and intuition and strange things were accepted as course, since they occurred with such alarming frequency in his child-life. Madara inclined his head at him, tribute from one shinobi to another.

"I'll accept it. For now."

"For now?"

"For now, _Madara-san_."

Itachi hated this, the reminder that he had lost his trademark politeness. He raised his head and gravely repeated, "Madara-san."

And how sweet it was, his name from the little mouth, like droplets of water falling away from parted lips, after an impromptu drink in a stream.

"What relation are you to me, Madara-san?"

The question should have been expected, but it was not.

"I don't know, Itachi-kun. If you would like, however, I can be your teacher. For the time being."

"I had a teacher at the academy," said Itachi. "And I have a jonin teacher. Ibiki-sensei."

"Suit yourself. I wish you all the best in your studies."

"Thank you, Madara-san."

Madara bowed, his work for the time being finished, when Itachi suddenly said, "You were right. His name is Sasuke."

That was when he knew he had him—not now, not even in a year or two years, but he had him, as surely as he could have arranged it himself.

He turned slowly, as if this piece of information did not interest him at all—which it didn't, really, it was the implication that was of interest.

"I know. And he's the world to you."

"Yes," said Itachi simply. It was so stark and clean that it couldn't have been anything but a declaration of strength—it reminded Madara of another man, dark-haired and dark-eyed but as different from the Uchiha as day and night, professing the same indisputable love for a village that was then just a circle of thatched roofs in the dark. The simplicity of the declaration transformed it from an opinion into a fact of nature—this was love ennobled, it was meant to be, perhaps, but Madara had never conducted inquiries into the nature of love and had no intention of examining it from any closer than this.

This, too, was a fact. He walked away, then, leaving an eight-year-old boy with crimson eyes to stare after him with an unruffled gaze. Itachi had grown up as he did everything else, so painlessly and noiselessly that Madara didn't notice until after it had already happened.

**~X~**

The moment came on a moonlight night when Itachi's face, spattered with blood and horror, was so bone-white against the trees that Madara forgot which one was supposed to be the ghost. It was clear from the unfocused look in his eyes that the boy had forgotten his way to the Uchiha complex. There were two bleeding scars on his cheeks, deliberate-looking, the work of interrogators looking to make a statement, no doubt.

"They are dead," said Itachi, in a voice that was wrong. "They died. I escaped."

"Who's dead, Itachi-kun?"

"My teammates. They died. Ibiki-sensei and I escaped. I am going home. They died."

The repetitions in his words were a bad sign, and Madara's memory flashed through all the phases of survivor's guilt just in time for his arms to shoot out and snatch the ten-year-old before he crumpled to the forest floor in a dead faint.

He sponged water over his forehead and laid ice on the fledgling sharingan, which by now had bled its red into the sclera of Itachi's eyes—overuse, no doubt, what were the clan members doing? Why were they wasting their time with fire techniques without teaching their sons the most elementary principles of sharingan use?

"I am going to die too," said Itachi calmly, when he woke up and was unable to see.

"Silence, Itachi-kun."

Madara tied Itachi's hair back into a ponytail and washed his bloodstained clothes, drying them out thoroughly with katons before dressing him again and making sure he had clean bandages for his arms and his feet. When Itachi rose again, he was slightly steadier, although his eyes were still unfocused and his voice still had that off-key deadness.

Madara felt rage coming to him like a long-lost friend, opening its arms and crushing him to its chest and smothering him until he could barely see. What a village it had become, when a ten-year-old could flee the scene of two deaths and stumble home blind in the darkness, and all that would remain was the single tally in the register attesting that Uchiha Itachi had successfully completed another mission, while his teammates had not. What a village, in which his descendants would stay silent, and Uchiha Fugaku would clap his son's broken shoulders with nothing more than an "As expected of my son."

"I will be taking you home, Itachi-kun," said Madara. He supported the little body on his forearm all the way to the edge of the complex, and when they reached the cluster of houses with their cheery red-and-white fans Itachi turned his eyes toward him and said, "I did not want them to die," the same starkness with which he had admitted how much he loved Sasuke.

Then, "They will not care."

_They_ being the owners of the well-lit houses Itachi was going home too, the Uchihas with their proud eyes and seclusionist tendencies and home candlelight that now gilded the wet trails on Itachi's cheeks.

Madara did not care either for the nameless teammates that Itachi had lost, but he had lived long enough to know that a common hatred is much stronger than a common love, and that in the end, the lines could blur there too, so that it was impossible to tell what existed in the first place. And he and Itachi shared a common hatred now, and who knew what that would become?

"We will not let it happen again," he said. From across generations he looked at his descendant, and then the line changed with the slick refraction of glass, and it was a teacher and student who stood on either side of the divide.

"No," agreed Itachi, "Madara-sensei."

**~X~**

This was what Itachi knew: six fire techniques, twenty-seven taijutsu katas, memorized rules for reconnaissance, tracking, and defense, and some impractically gymnastic kunai and shuriken manuevers he had apparently invented himself. Madara asked him to replicate some suiton and fuuton techniques, but he didn't seem to know any. It was unbelievable.

"You are a _sharingan user_," he said coldly on the first day, after Itachi had landed and the nine incinerated kunais were quivering harmlessly in their targets. "You do not need to resort to this sort of flamboyant nonsense in order to do well. Speed, genjutsu, and your ability to copy movements are your greatest assets."

"The Gokakyu is the pride of the Uchiha," said Itachi acidly.

Madara didn't know who had started the idiotic Uchiha fascination with fire techniques, so that children like Itachi were well-versed in their use before they fully understood the application of the sharingan—which was, technically, a part of their bodies. It was another reason to dislike the clan and its inane policies, half of which hurt the Uchiha more than anyone else and were clearly implemented to curry favor with the Hokage and whatever rival clans were in vogue at the time. It was a testament to this that the most skilled and famous sharingan user in the Fire Country was Hatake Kakashi, not even an Uchiha and still twice as skilled as most of them had ever been with their own sharingan.

"You have what you need to win any fight against any opponent. I don't want to see you limiting yourself like this again."

"…Yes, Madara-sensei."

"I am going to perform several suiton techniques, now, and I want you to copy them at full speed."

"Yes, Madara-sensei." Itachi retrieved a notebook from his pack, clearly intending to write down hand seals as he was taught at the academy, and Madara backhanded the notebook away from him without allowing him to turn the page.

"With your sharingan, Itachi-kun. Your father has clearly been an imbecile of the highest caliber with regards to your training. I do not intend to be so lax."

It was acutely humiliating just how much the clan had slipped, Madara thought, as he ran through elementary water techniques and Itachi's tomoe spun hesitantly in his eyes. Sharingan had their adolescence just as other parts of the body did, but this, this was just awkward, the fact that Itachi clearly had no idea what the hell he was trying to do despite having had the wheel eye for two years already. Had Uchiha Fugaku taught him _anything_ aside from useless barbecue techniques? This was his last thought before he executed a particularly fast Suiryoden and Itachi set his tomoe spinning, crossed his eyes, and knocked himself out through sheer confusion.

Madara just let the Suiryoden get him in order to wake him up, and when the boy sat up, sputtering, he gave Madara the first really baleful glare he had ever received. He couldn't help but smile—what was this, the protective idiocy again, coming back like a persistent puppy now that Itachi was ten?—and then he said, "Get up. You need to learn that one," and Itachi said, "_No_. Show me," and Madara was so amused at the commanding inflection that he grabbed Itachi's chin and locked eyes with him and sent his student head over heels into the genjutsu.

"The spin for the copy is simple," he murmured, spinning his own tomoe and enjoying the wet slide of muscles, the quick beat of blood as his veins fluttered to accommodate the pressure. "Once clockwise…half a counterclockwise turn…and then clockwise spins for the duration of the jutsu. With me, now."

And then, genjutsu seizing Itachi's small muscles, he ran through the copy with the child. Itachi's eyes were wide and fixed on his, and in the genjutsu, Madara could feel the boy's tomoe moving in slow, langorous circles, a mature movement he had given them, so unexpectedly sensuous. Itachi's eyelashes fluttered even as his sharingan whirled; Madara thought he was about to close them, but instead, he merely opened his mouth slightly, giving him a glimpse of a wet lower lip and the dancing tongue behind it. In the genjutsu, it would have been so easy to—

Itachi sighed once, smoothly, a sound like a sword slipping back into its sheath.

He opened his eyes, and Madara knew how it must look to a boy of ten, his teacher's serious face, frozen in the act of staring at him.

"I can do it, Madara-sensei," Itachi said, misinterpreting.

Madara let go of his chin and broke the genjutsu and kept his distance, even turning the sharingan off to see the boy as a normal person would, although the line had been crossed, in that moment, quite cleanly, at an impossible angle.

And Itachi opened his eyes and did it, clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise, and unleashed the water-wave that swept away the last boundary between them. When his eyes came up again, fade-to-black impassive, Madara couldn't help but praise him, in the only way he knew how.

"We will be moving on, Itachi-kun."

"Of course, Madara-sensei."

Lines vanished. New lines sprung into being—it was a fact, but had it always been that way? He didn't know.

**~X~**

Twelve, and Itachi threw tantrums as any other boy his age did. Kunai in tree trunks at odd broken angles, enormous explosions of fire techniques he didn't really need, not anymore, cleverly vicious genjutsu that left Madara alternately gasping and laughing when he allowed himself to fall into them. Itachi himself didn't care; he was preoccupied, the sweet glaze of thought overlaying his eyes—which, by now, were the perfect gemstone weapons Madara hadn't seen in three generations.

"He is too _little_," his young charge bit out one day, so clearly infuriated that he was reduced to talking to his teacher, something he rarely did these days.

"He will not enter the academy," said Madara dismissively. "He hasn't mastered your father's idiotic fire jutsu yet, have you forgotten?"

Itachi gave him the closest thing to a glare he could muster up without losing his dignity. "_That_ is what you are worried about? Not the fact that Sasuke is six—"

"Izuna was four. Sasuke's age does not concern me, no."

This had little effect on Itachi, who gave an elegant wave of his hand—Madara was beginning to recognize some of his gestures, old-fashioned graceful motions that were two-hundred years anachronistic at this point, and it afforded him no end of amusement. Itachi had taken more than he knew of him—or as much as he intended to, which was more likely the case—and it gratified him oddly, not the parental doting one would expect, but something more complex, with tones like a particularly excellent wine.

"Sasuke is not your brother," said Itachi curtly.

"He's yours. Does that make him special?"

He was aware of the mocking quality of his tone, but it was too easy, really, and Itachi gave him a look that pointedly articulated the subterranean lowness of his existence before settling himself against the bark of a tree and letting his book fall open. Madara had lately been assigning him civilian books, and they often read together—psychology, usually, novels at times, historical tracts on occasion. These last were rare, as whenever Itachi wanted to know about a great event, Madara could pour it into his skull through genjutsu, so that by now Itachi had seen four wars and a coup and the entire bloody reign of the fourth Mizukage, who had assumed the position after Madara had stepped down in the Water Country.

The metamorphosis of war had been so complete for Itachi, at four, that he had not flinched at these revelations. But then, that was how Itachi was—like the pupil of an eye, he expanded to take in sudden and terrible surges of light—he didn't care if he himself would be damaged, or if the influx of brightness would break his bones; he was a pupil, in all the ways one could be, and he would always make himself learn.

He and Madara had their alikeness in that, so that the rest of the things—the things that had to do with Itachi's cheekbones, now sharp like an older boy's, and the hypnotic anemone movements of his fingers, and the tense pearly skin that encased his joints, such poisonously sweet skin—were marginally less wrong, just differences shunted aside to focus on similarities, as in any friendship, as in any…

"Is this true?" Itachi asked, tapping a perfect crescent fingernail on the edge of his book. "That there are no clan affiliations in Suna?"

Madara affirmed that this was the case.

Itachi looked stunned. "…Really?"

Itachi never repeated himself, but Madara knew this piece of information was particularly difficult for him to digest, and he had a sudden unwelcome vision of his student in Suna headgear with sand pooling in his collarbones, his eyelashes. Itachi would have been different in Suna; that was for certain, without a clan and without a place.

"You've never been to Suna on a mission?"

"No," said Itachi. "However, I am interested in this method of social organization. Perhaps when I am an ANBU."

Not _if_. Even at twelve, Itachi had no _ifs_.

"Is it viable?"

Sometimes Madara felt like Itachi had been asking him this question from the very beginning of their time together, at first about fire techniques and other mundane jutsus ("Madara-sensei. Convection does not work that way"), then about more complicated matters ("It seems more practical to enage positive sensory genjutsu, not torture") and now, in the waning of his apprenticeship, about the workings of other countries ("But, if sociometrics is taken into account, then Kiri's economy…"). He had heard Itachi described as taciturn often, by his new teammates and his former academy teachers, but like many prodigies, Itachi was verbal and quick-witted in debate, and, also like many prodigies, got himself into many more debates than the average student. He seemed to enjoy these more than physical sparring, and in that respect, he was very like the Shodaime himself, a bookish man whose grasp on strategies and alliances had in fact come from civilian treatises and not practical experience.

The Shodaime had been strangely utopian until the very end—what else would he have been, starting the 'hidden village' as if it were meant to be some kind of refuge from the world, instead of the hotbed of violence it actually was?

Itachi had that same utopian nature, but in him, his toneless voice and his flat eyes and his horrifically controlled limbs, it was so much more apparent that the true nature of a utopian was that of a mercenary.

"Madara-sensei. Is it viable?"

"Yes," said Madara immediately, because it was. "The nuclear family is the central unit in Suna, which is why most of their primary organizational structures are sibling-based. The Go-Kyodai, for example—"

This was easy, talking and explaining and ignoring the raw envy in Itachi's eyes. Already his love for Sasuke had become the white flame Madara was afraid of, a strange perversity of fixation that cemented his initial suspicion: Itachi would never love anything in what was called a _normal _fashion; his feeling for Sasuke was something outside the circle of sociopathic clarity he lived in.

Such sameness, again, the groove worn into the riverbeds. But Madara had never been one to submerge himself in nostalgia—his own childhood, after all, had been nothing to revisit, simply a first step, the optimistic kick from the sidelines before he found himself adrift in the ages.

And after all, there were differences, too—later that summer, there was the perfect curve of Uchiha Shisui's arm around Itachi's waist, and Itachi's fingers tangled in a riot of touch-me curls, and the bitten pink of his lips after a week-long mission in the Grass Country with his best friend. Madara let it pass with forbearance. Itachi was still young. And it was easy to ignore, except for the tinge of Shisui that invaded Itachi's mind in the genjutsu when he took control of him, sometimes a stroke of raucous laughter, or the feel of a grin against small lips.

"I would never have suspected you of such sentimentality," said Madara dryly one day, after he'd dispelled the genjutsu and let his student lie back on the grass, breathing heavily and reorienting himself to the usual sun and sky and trees. Itachi had given him a look so precisely his age that it was actually jarring—the open-mouthed twelve-year-old flush of new fruit, uncertainty, being caught disheveled in a deserted Academy classroom.

"Shisui is my best friend," said Itachi curtly.

"Don't be defensive. This is very common among shinobi. Most sublimate their sexual urges by means of close childhood friends."

"Did you?"

Yes, once there had been a hand fisted in Madara's shirt, as well. Yes, once there had been a laugh like birds breaking out of trees, and yes, once there had been a long training trip, curious open-mouth kisses, the awkward negotiations of noses, elbows, fingers seeking an anchor, and through it like a vein the liquid-sweet agony that Madara had never felt again.

Yes, there had been that, and now there were pinwheeling red eyes to show for it, and yes, it had been an acceptable trade.

"Yes," he said, "I did."

Itachi asked nothing further. Still, Madara was surprised at what Shisui made of him, so that for those few sunlit months, when he was tired in the mornings and smiled more often and even once came to Madara with his hair unbound and messy, he was only a normal boy, and not a great one. Shisui came to find him so often that Madara, even with his invisibility jutsu, had taken to wearing a mask to hide his face.

"Remember that this is not your future," Madara said to Itachi.

"I know that, Madara-sensei," and it was a tossed-away sentence, with all the nonchalance of someone who didn't care.

**~X~**

The coup grew—_such stupidity_,_ a hundred years too late_—and Itachi turned thirteen in a sudden burst of phoenix flame, emerging with a black scorchmark on his shoulder in the shape of an ANBU tattoo.

"Let me see it," said Madara, and Itachi allowed his teacher to ghost fingertips over his induction mark. His arm had grown leanly muscled, stippled with the sun-shadows of leaves in the clearing, and his skin was downed with colorless hairs that made Madara long to bend his head, touch his lips to the black twist in the center, perhaps taste whatever mysteries lay where Itachi's wrist did, in the hold of his fingers. But he simply nodded and pulled away.

Itachi was still young and although he would never have said it, oddly self-conscious, and so he wore his boatlike Uchiha shirt underneath his breastplate, instead of the form-fitting spandex other ANBU preferred. Leading his squad back from their missions, he was something to see, the slender tiny form at the front of the coalition—and the night unraveling before him like something he had conjured.

The clan grew dull around him, as bronze was never a setting for a diamond.

Fury came with his maturity. Veiled insults in the street, hostile words of pride smeared in envy, mothers hustling their children away. And Itachi's polite nature buckled under the weight, but in the end, he did not care enough to be affected, although Shisui shouted and got in barroom brawls and exerted his fifteen-year-old limits trying to defend Itachi's honor like some sort of misnamed knight. But in Itachi's mind there was only a cool detachment, a _why_, as it were, the sense of a logical contradiction. He had only done what he was told, after all. There was no reason for him to be disliked.

Madara knew about greatness. He could have asked and answered the question for him. But he simply let it sit, a teabag seeping its blood into water, and Itachi's resentment grew in slow calcified patterns, intellectual nautilus spirals of bewilderment and disapproval.

Their 'pipeline,' they called him, and Madara laughed.

**~X~**

It was inevitable that Itachi was caught in the middle, small Atlas with his shoulders stiff and his head held high, and Madara felt drowned in whitewater pride at the sight of him methodically polishing his ninjato, laying out kunai in neat rows, inserting shuriken into a holster, and explaining his mission to Madara in matter-of-fact tones.

"I know you dislike them."

"I have no bond with them strong enough to engender dislike."

"You have no bond with anyone."

"You should know by now that genius has its own bonds," said Madara. They spoke like this to one another now, without salutations, free and without expectation. It was a language Madara could understand, but still, somehow, it had the air of a novelty beyond comprehension.

"I will help you," said Madara, and he saw them through the years, the evolving eyes of the child Itachi, all assessing him with their frank stare and wearing down the walls of ages as surely as the river crumbles its brittle sediment. They whirled for a moment, their own dark genjutsu. Itachi looked at him and inclined his head—one shinobi to another, and where had he seen that motion before?

"You have done a great deal for me."

It was a meager acknowledgment, but genius had its own bonds, and so it was only understandable that it spoke its own language. Itachi's hand snaked out and sealed itself over Madara's wrist—light flutter of pressure, like a bird alighting—and then it was gone, and the thin streak of his tied back-hair receded into the twilight, as cranes called over the marshes and the summer night spread its wings over Konoha again.

**~X~**

They killed Shisui on a day so beautiful that all the parts of Madara's spirit woke themselves up simply to say they were alive. A blue-eyed sky, and the world on its axis was a pearl in a necklace, and the golden infusion of sunlight must have been brewed in heaven, it must have, because the gilded edge of each leaf looked sketched into being by some celestial artist, not organically grown but drawn simply for the purpose of existing in that moment. There had only been a handful of days like this in the long-winding spool of Madara's life.

He meant to tell Itachi to pick himself off the ground and wash the blood away, but instead what came out was:

"…And when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart…and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders."

The sun had turned the blood on Itachi's cheeks to light.

"It sounds old."

"It is."

The two-hundred-year old funeral song was as it had been then, words released like moths crumbling at the touch of light, their echoes following Shisui's body away across the Nakano. The currents came in and filled the space where he had been.

The river in the afternoon twilight was a frieze of glitter, a handful of coins abandoned in the current. The water was blue and silver and a thousand shades of sweetness, and Madara trailed his hands in it as he held Itachi's hair back and washed the blood away. Shisui had not resisted. The blood was from the change of Itachi's eyes, nothing more.

"Show me," he said, and Itachi showed him the pinwheels without a flicker of emotion. The tearless silence was suddenly filled with early evening birdsong.

"The world celebrates for you," said Madara. "It is an insult to grieve like this."

"I have never cared for what the world does," said Itachi coolly, in many ways a teenager rebelling, in many ways a star in its descent, in many ways something that Madara still couldn't name. His hands were still on Itachi's neck. He curled his fingers briefly around it, and felt like burns on his skin the thin ridge of the adam's apple, the flickering pulse, the sinews that shafted his skin together.

Two men at either end of of time—opposite ends of the riverbank—watching each other with the same eyes, at last. Madara let go of Itachi's neck.

"You have been a credit to me," he said, the only tribute he could give him, and in the end this was what was needed for Itachi to put his head in his hands and banish Shisui in a flood of silent tears, as the beautiful day ended with the summer, and the colder autumn came rushing in.

**~X~**

On a hilltop traced in starlight, they stood and surveyed the aftermath of the massacre. Madara remembered a time when they had only ever been across from one another—teacher and student, one learning, one giving—but now they were only ever side by side, drenched in the wash of time that turned a hand-holding boy into a slender warrior. A partner was what Itachi was now, and Madara knew that this fact caused him equal measures of pain and joy.

Understanding came at quite a price, sometimes, and the loneliness of stars, light-years apart and touching one another long after the fact, was something he understood as well as Itachi did. Perhaps, for this reason, he relished Itachi's presence at his side.

"This is what you did here," he said, stretching his hand out and pointing five fingers out at the blood-stippled buildings in the distance. "Stopped a war. Saved a village. Destroyed a cancer before it could destroy its host. Proved the greatness of your blood, the greatness of your mind. Proved that you are made of what they are not."

"And what did you do?" asked Itachi quietly.

And there was that hot, brutal pride again, because his student had known to fix on the single flaw in that sentence.

"You are a credit to me," he said again.

Itachi inclined his head politely and turned his eyes away, back towards the buildings, the eyes of an eagle in flight. Somewhere in that labyrinth of destroyed ambitions was Sasuke, the white-hot spark at the center of his life, and even as Itachi turned and made his way off the hilltop, Madara knew he was walking towards him, not away.

"We did this," said Itachi coldly, and it was not an endearing statement. "Not me."

**~X~**

It was in the current Akatsuki base, when Itachi had been introduced to Kisame by Pein and the young teenager had demonstrated his eye techniques to a skeptical audience, that Madara administered ointments, swathed ice water across Itachi's eyelids, and allowed the darkness to coat him like healing oil. Itachi's eyes were closed and voluntarily sightless.

Madara remembered his first use of Amaterasu—the moment when he had called the sun-fire into being, springing from his fingers and setting the day aflame, harsh hair-raising scream of flame, the deadliness, the noise—

—but the remarkable thing was Itachi's eyes, wide and beautiful in their consternation, and then pleased in a way that Madara would remember for all the rest of his long years on earth. A wild joy like shards of ice. The pure beauty of a child in its first steps, or the lover on receiving the sought-after consent, unsullied, clean beauty, not at the power of the fire technique, but its impossibility, the dream made real. The fact that he had been the one to let the dawn in, as he had never known he could during his mundane life of academy classes and domestic chores and missions for the sake of allegiance to some norm or another. There was a tragedy there, but also, there was a discovery.

They were the same then. They had always been, even when they would eventually diverge to follow their ideologies to disparate conclusions—they had been the same for that moment. Mediocrity varied in its forms and faces, but greatness was ever the _same_, same, same.

Itachi's eyes opened at Madara's halted touch.

He rose like a flower or a ghost—already the changes had begun; he was no longer a plainclothes teenager in an oversize shirt, he was an adult, flame-stained nails and lips that looked capable of drawing blood. And Madara let him twist his collar and bring him closer, luminous eyes narrow in the darkness. His slender hands already heavy with the new red ring.

The kiss was like water rushing into places unfilled.

Sunlight sparkled on all the rivers of his youth, meandering across the Fire Country when it was still an open plain to be conquered, and the silt of countless riverbanks caressed his toes as each funeral and parting replayed itself and tapered away and vanished into the dark water of memories, Madara sunk backward, opening his arms for the embrace of water—here, this was a current he hadn't felt, this was a stream he hadn't mapped yet--and Itachi pulled away, dark eyes full to overflowing with his own reflection, and yet, strangely shoreless.

"You said that genius has its own bonds," he said. "Show me."

He knew, he knew. It was something—a coping mechanism, a distraction, some permutation of psychology—something that in the end would not be real, or at the very least, less real than what the past centuries had been, floating adrift like a body bound for rivers unseen. In the end, Itachi's dissimilarities would overpower him, and they would part ways again. It was acceptable to him. He curled his hands into Itachi's sweat-soaked hair and felt his mouth open into his, wet curve of lips, iron-tasting tongue, roaring water in his ears.

It didn't matter. Konoha lay open, a cracked fruit fallen from a tree, and eventually he would plunder what he wanted and Itachi would thwart him and they would clash again and again as the unruly tides, but for now, they inhabited a moment of symmetry.

They were great men. And in every direction, the starlit vistas unfurled, and waited for their touch.

**~X~**

_This I want you to know: you have been the one encounter in my life that cannot be repeated._

**~X~**

_end_


End file.
